The bay area is BRUTAL for dating; especially if you aren't' a white. conventionally attractive millionaire. I'm not saying this based onm tinder but from actually putting myself out there at bars and parties.

7 years working in startups -> long dry spells between a few one night stands. Eventually I gave up trying to form a connection with anyone. I had plenty of cash but life just felt empty and lonely.

One day I had enough and picked up a remote job and started traveling. The dating pool gets a lot better when you leave the united states. I had met a great girlfriend within a month of staying in Colombia.

Bay area -> make your money and get out as soon as you have the connections. its not worth staying.

I think some kinds of video games provide this more than others, at least for some definitions of achievement. If somebody spends their free time painting happy trees but never sells any paintings, I personally would not say achievements are fake. The painter sets their own objective and judge success by their own personal standards, but that doesn't make their achievements fake, right? And if they decide to depict things using lego instead of paint, is that fundamentally different? It's a different form of craft, but I don't consider building sculptures out of lego to be faker than doing the same from clay.

Some video games are essentially the same as that. For instance, creative-mode minecraft seems to be arts and crafts as much as it is a game.

Yeah - I didn't mean to generalize the entire medium.

I love story based games, indie games, etc. I think creative games like Minecraft are similarly worthwhile too.

Things like:

- Gone Home

- Life is Strange

- Firewatch

- Tacoma

- Elsinore

- Untitled Goose Game

There's lots of great stuff out there that isn't just a slot machine. Unfortunately slot machines make a lot of money so you also get WoW, and GTA ruined by GTA Online, in-app purchase corrupting content into Zynga style everything.

Kudos to Apple for trying to combat this with Apple Arcade.

This blogger reviews an interesting game, he also writes a lot about fake achievement: https://pixelpoppers.com/2018/05/close-reading-of-qube-direc...

> fake achievement

Nothing exposes that more than writing video games yourself, as well as having a job testing them.

    10 print "Walter is Great!"
    20 goto 10

There ya go. That's all video games are.

The fake courtesy of software irks me, too.

Highly recommend the game Pathologic then. A Russian subversion of video games as a medium (the vast majority of players don't finish it despite it being very short)